Digital Parsimony

To remove a defaming page about us on the internet we ask Google to remove it from their search results, and then Yahoo, and then everywhere else. Matt Cutts, SEO expert at Google, discusses this in detail.

Instead, we should be talking to the creator of the page directly and having them remove or modify the content of the page all-together, it will remove the results from not only Google and Yahoo, but everywhere else you haven’t thought of.

We’re signing legislation like the Internet Safety Act that prevents people from accessing the internet anonymously. Supposedly this is going to stop sex offenders and help the police catch them. Instead, it’s going to do more harm than good, completely eradicating available and open WiFi in places like Starbucks and your favorite sports bar.

We also take them off Facebook and Myspace. Instead, we should be figuring out a way to stop them from making sexual advances towards kids all together. Facebook has removed 5,585 sex offenders from their site since May of last year. Great, the only reason we’re doing this is because it’s measurable and easy to enact. This quote made me really think about us concentrating on the things we fear, instead of real problems:

“Why are we so obsessed with the registered sex offender side of the puzzle when the troubled kids are right in front of us? Why are we so obsessed with the Internet side of the puzzle when so many more kids are abused in their own homes? I feel like this whole conversation has turned into a distraction. Money and time is being spent focusing on the things that people fear rather than the very real and known risks that kids face. This breaks my heart.”
[Boing Boing: Internet not full of pedos, the statistical edition]

Last week, I wrote about doctors making patients sign EULAs that disallow them to give feedback on the services they received on review sites like RateMDs.com. Another instance of not concentrating on the real problem, but simply being afraid of losing clients due to poor service. Why doesn’t Apple make people sign EULAs to not review their products? That’s because they try to make great products which customers will review positively. We need to figure out how to make these tools work for us, instead of trying to fight them.

Doctors are making patients sign EULAs that make sure they can’t make any comments about them online (on websites like RateMDs). I think this is total garbage, and if your doctor is looking for you to sign something similar, get a new one. Wouldn’t it be funny if professors made you sign a paper that said you cant rate them at RateMyProfessor.com? What about having to sign something so you don’t rate products on Amazon or Epinions, that would be funny too.

“They’re basically forcing the patients to choose between health care and their First Amendment rights, and I really find that repulsive,” Swapceinski said.
[Docs seek gag orders to stop patients' reviews (AP)]

Luckily they will never be able to stop posting on the Internet and put “out of court settlement” into extinction. This is simply silly legislature, and the doctors that are complaining are clearly the bad ones. How about this suggestion: improve your practice so the reviews you get on the sites and blogs are good, then use that to sell yourself.

WebKit, the fastest open source web browser engine.

There are a lot of reasons why WebKit is used in so many applications. From Apple’s Safari—the default browser on the Mac and iPhone), Google’s Chrome—their flagship browser on both Windows and Android mobile platform, and Palm Pre’s Web OS operating system, WebKit has proven to be widely accepted amongst the giants of the industry. Even KDE and Nokia’s S60 use WebKit and this is one of the biggest reasons why:

Performance is a top priority for WebKit. We adhere to a simple directive for all work we do on WebKit.

Read the rest of this article »

 As I went over to my TV to turn it on, I noticed that I was surrounded by five seperate remotes, each of which has an infinite amount of buttons. Which of these do I even use? I just want to watch TV!

To do that, I have to first turn on the TV using one remote, then the cable box with another, then the sound system with the third. Eventually when all my devices come on and I can hear that screachy kid on American Idol loud and clear, I’ve forgotten how to switch the channel. I look down only to see about 50 tiny buttons, none of which point me in the right direction.

That reminded me of a post I saw on Gizmodo today. I think that manufacturers need to pay a bit more attention to simplicity. If I only use 10 buttons on a remote frequently, make them large and easy to use, the rest you can hide behind a bezel or put them in a less-convenient place.

Value the importance of using less to accomplish more. If you can combine the play, pause, and select buttons into just one, do so. Why do we still have seperate buttons for fast forwarding and skipping to the next chapter? Press the button to go to the next chapter, and hold it to fast forward. For example, here’s the remote for an Apple TV:

A netbook is essentially a small laptop. It’s often characterized by having a tiny solid-state hard drive, a processor that’s very efficient at conserving energy, and a screen just big enough to read on. Below is Clive Thompson on Netbooks:

But here’s the catch: Most of the time, we do almost nothing. Our most common tasks—email, Web surfing, watching streamed videos—require very little processing power. Only a few people, like graphic designers and hardcore gamers, actually need heavy-duty hardware. For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, while customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they never did. So coders took advantage of that surplus power to write ever-bulkier applications and operating systems.

[The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time]

Over is the time of “bigger is better”, welcome to the era of efficiency. I love how the author relates fast laptops to SUVs, and I think it makes sense. When fuel prices in the United States were on the rise, people started buying more efficient vehicles that better suited their real-world uses. With the recession in full swing, we’re seeing the same idea trickle down to consumer goods. This is a large leap in understanding the beauty of small and simple.

I just discovered a nifty application in Google Labs, it’s called Google Sets. It basically finds anything synonymous to the things you enter. I never though about it before, but if you enter three or four artists you like, it’ll recommend some similar ones. I found some great music this way, you should try it! Google Sets.

Do you use Google Reader or Netvibes to read all your news? I do, and they are both missing one critical feature. I have 2 news sites that I always keep up with that have no RSS feeds I can subscribe to. What can you do? Before I found out about Feed43 I had to the sites manually. So I go to their main page, this is the first thing I see:

Your favorite site doesn’t provide news feeds?
This free online service converts any web page to an RSS feed on the fly.

This is what at least Feed43 advertises they can do. So I tested it with my two favorite reads: Jeremy Clarkson’s column on Times Online, and NewOrder’s Network & Security portal.

With a little bit of tinkering (about a 1/2 an hour), I was able to configure my very own custom RSS feed to subscribe to in my news aggregator. Sure, it requires a little knowledge of code, but their instructions were pretty good. I love how specific the tool gets, letting you extract even the smallest snippets of information and make the feed as usable and good looking as possible.

Check out the two feeds I created and feel free to subscribe:

1. Jeremy Clarkson Column | Times Online
2. NewOrder – computer security and networking portal

The music industry whales are putting our internet service providers under pressure by constantly making laws and regulations about how they need to monitor their traffic for pimple-nosed kids downloading the latest Jay-Z album from their favorite BitTorrent site. Who pays for the new filtering equipment though? The ISPs do, and I think that’s lame. The RIAA doesn’t understand that the Internet isn’t a government-controlled utility that can be shut off, it’s a collaboration of private networks controlled by the private sector. In other words, we do what we want. So what does Jerry Scroggin from Bayou Internet and Communications do? Ask them to put their money where their mouth is, and of course, they don’t really want to stop piracy, they just want to rob more people with their crazy lawsuits.

Scroggin said that he receives several notices each month with requests that he remove suspected file sharers from his network. Each time, he gets such a notice from an entertainment company, he sends the same reply.

“I ask for their billing address,” Scroggin said. “Usually, I never hear back.”

Snipped from CNET News.

This is why technology is still an inspiration to me. It enables people to do things that were previously impossible.

In this example, 60 Minutes showes what technology can do already: Read the rest of this article »

Wired just had an interesting post about airport security. We know that they check our shoes and make us throw out our toothpaste for our own good, but is it actually stopping terrorists? Read the rest of this article »